Electromechanical data handling and storage devices can be susceptible to data loss or corruption due to external contaminants, or impurities, interfering with their operation. Typical devices well known in the industry include but are not limited to “Winchester” style disc drives, tape drives, and optical storage devices. Such devices use a magnetizable medium coated on a supporting substrate where information is written and stored coupled with a mechanism(s) used to write and or to retrieve that information stored on the medium. Such data handling devices commonly contain these components in addition to others within a chamber. These data handling devices are often designed with a variety of safeguards to help prevent impurities from coming into contact and damaging the magnetizable medium resulting in data loss. Such safeguards can include any one or combination of specialized materials, lubricants, filters, seals and pumps. However, these preventative solutions to guard against impurities have had only limited success.
Reliable data handling and storage is a critical parameter used to gage the successfulness of data handling devices. The implications of even minor data loss in data handling devices can be detrimental to the salability of that device in addition to further financial damage to a manufacturer's reputation due to frustrated end users. As a consequence, sample lots of these devices are generally tested in a variety of normal to accelerated functionality operations to measure their level of reliability. If damage occurs to either the magnetizable medium or the mechanism used to write or retrieve information, the device will have effectively lost data and in some circumstances, lost data in a specific and identifiable location. In some instances, environments are artificially generated containing dispersed impurities at a designed concentration to accelerate these types of data loss failures.
Dispersing commonly encountered impurities, often in the form of particulates, in concentrated levels around data handling devices have been used by people skilled in the art to help understand the data integrity relative to the impurities. Further, procedures have been created to test the effectiveness of data handling and storage in an artificially generated commonly encountered impurity rich environment. These procedures and tests can give insight as to how well the device can cope with the impurity used in order to enhance the design to safeguard around such an impurity. These procedures can also lead to testing of competitive devices in order to formulate a level of comparative performance.
Accelerated impurity enriched reliability testing of data handling devices can provide clues to the damage resistance of magnetizable medium or the components that transfer data thereon. There are a multitude of factors that dramatically change the robustness to particle type impurities inherent in the engineering designs of these devices, as touched upon earlier. There are also varied responses within the device due to particle type(s) and size(s). As a result, it is extremely difficult to decouple the positive and negative contributions of various designs and components when interacting with commonly encountered particulate impurities between data handling devices.
Among the designs and components that is currently difficult to figure out in data handling and storage devices is the ability to seal the device from these external particulate impurities. Most of these devices are designed to be sealed from particulate impurities external to the devices. By this it is meant that a sealed chamber herein is a chamber having a barrier, a gap in the chamber covered by a seal. A seal acts as a barrier capable of preventing the transfer of material, in this case a particle larger than the minimal acceptable size. A seal could include a gasket, filter, or simply a gap in the chamber below the minimal acceptable area. Because the current state of the art testing procedures have limited repeatability in terms of acceptably testing the true effectiveness of the seal of a device's chamber, an improved test that is far more decisive and informative is needed for the development of a more competitive and superior designed data handling and storage device.